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[saintjebus]

So, I'm wondering if this trap will work the way I want it to.
I have a magma chamber above a hallway. The hallway floor is all floor grates. Below the floor is an empty chamber. When I pull the lever, magma drops from the ceiling chamber to invaders in the hallway.

My question is, will the magma fall straight through the floor grates while leaving the invaders and their (magma-safe) equipment intact?

Thanks.

[FuzzyZergling]

I'm pretty sure the magma will hit them even if it's falling.

[vjek]

So, I'm wondering if this trap will work the way I want it to.
I have a magma chamber above a hallway. The hallway floor is all floor grates. Below the floor is an empty chamber. When I pull the lever, magma drops from the ceiling chamber to invaders in the hallway.

My question is, will the magma fall straight through the floor grates while leaving the invaders and their (magma-safe) equipment intact?

Thanks.

Having done extensive research on the subject at hand, I have found the following to be generally true.

• Magma can instantly vaporize some creatures
• Magma can take quite a while to vaporize some creatures
• Immersing a humanoid creature (like a goblin, or a troll) in 7/7 depth magma will ensure their death 100% of the time, provided they are not moving at the moment in time the magma reaches 7/7 depth

Having said that..
The following is sometimes true:

• Magma does not kill instantly
• Moving magma can push creatures without harming them.

Your idea has merit, and may work.  You may find, however, it merely lights your enemies on fire, and they will run around smoking and billowing trying to escape, leaving messy bits of themselves behind as they run.  Untidy!

Personally, I found that I had to create a sealed chamber (with a retractable bridge-floor and raise-able bridge walls) with a snorkel type room-is-full indicator to ensure full 7/7 immersion and burn.
In that case, all weapons are preserved.  All messy organic bits are vaporized.  Even copper and silver often survive (at least, the initial bath) but for certain, all the iron survives.

Oh, and currently, magma does jack and squat to zombies.  So... watch out for that, or don't have them in your world.

[saintjebus]

Haha. I went ahead and did a dry test run with the system. What was supposed to happen, was the magma was supposed to drop through the floor, fill the pit below, and then get extinguished by another resevoir of water dropping down through the same grate. I chose.....poorly.

The magma dump went off, dropped through the grate, began filling the pit, and incidentally, lighting my hallway on fire. The hallway that was the only way in or out of my fortress. So, now I have a raging prairie fire roaring toward my Trade Depot, and I order my dwarves to pull the close lever on the magma, and the open lever on the water. Then I wait. No one wanted to pull the lever, apparantly for fear that something even more terrible than the wildfire would be release.

Someone finally pulled both levers (magma lever first), and then the flaw in my design came to light. I had positioned the water reservoir directly above the magma reservoir. Not a problem if the magma drop was still open. It wasn't. The water which was supposed to stop the magma death sealed itself inside the magma reservoir, while the wildfire raged unchecked one level down.

Much Fun was had.

[vjek]

Good times!  Initially, last year, I had this grandiose plan of a torturous hallway, and a winding path of the magma source above, pushing down into the hallway and out through the sides, through fortifications.

Little did I know fortifications are treated as empty spaces when full of liquid.  You can push a pregnant yak through those tiles without so much as a blink of the eye

So my second trial of the system pushes a goblin ambush directly through the fortifications, completely unharmed, into the interior of the fort.

You bet your plump helmets they slaughtered every dwarf they could find.  Fun indeed!

[Starver]

It looks like you've discovered one or more of the essential truths of Dwarf Fortress...

And one of those, in particular, is that you should never trap magma!  It should be allowed to roam free, in its natural environment!  (i.e. busy corridors, stockpiles, workshops, dining rooms...)

[saintjebus]

I did have something else unusual happen right before I did that test. I embarked on a volcano(that's how I had all that available magma). I put my forge level on the top so I wouldn't have to worry about draining magma into a reservoir right away. Something must have happened, because I went up to the forge level, and something had caught the grass on fire. It acted like magma had gotten too close, but I hadn't had a problem up until that point.

Do you guys have any idea what might have caused that to happen?

[vjek]

I did have something else unusual happen right before I did that test. I embarked on a volcano(that's how I had all that available magma). I put my forge level on the top so I wouldn't have to worry about draining magma into a reservoir right away. Something must have happened, because I went up to the forge level, and something had caught the grass on fire. It acted like magma had gotten too close, but I hadn't had a problem up until that point.

Do you guys have any idea what might have caused that to happen?

In my experience, that's globs of magma from magma crabs or fire imps playing about.

It's one of the reasons I cap off my surface volcanos with obsidian now (just pump water into it for a while, or use dfhack) , to avoid the chronic grass fires from the magma denizens.  It's a nifty idea in theory, but not so nifty in practice when 30 dwarf migrants arrive and their first step puts them in a raging inferno.

[Starver]

I'd say either heat-transmission, tile-to-tile, of some kind, that takes a little time to cause a problem[1] or (my best guess) some fire creature or other (possibly a fire-snake vermin?) caused it.

Did you set your magmaforges so that their 'blocked' tiles covered all of the fuelling magma-tiles?  If not, then the imps and such might have crawled out (although usually you end up with dwarves being interrupted, IIRC), but there's nothing to stop fire-vermin teleporting anywhere at all within the appropriate biome, and I have no idea whether they could then end up crawling over the grass (if it isn't already within the biome), or at least adjacent to it if that's close enough to it to spark something off.


(Slightly ninjaed with the same ideas from vjek, but posting anyway.)

[1] Or had to wait for a shrub to grow on a crucial spot between the existing grass and the hotter bits.

[saintjebus]

Ok, it must have been fire imps. I saw a couple about 50 z-levels down when I embarked, but I didn't think anything of it, and I didn't see any before the fire. OTOH, I wasn't looking for them before the fire- and afterwards I was just trying to keep anyone from dying in the fire. Fortunately, everything on that level was made of stone.

Of course, I finished the fire imps job for them soon after.....